Chapter Four #2
I'd been on the couch for ten days. Ten nights of lying there with my feet hanging over the arm, listening to her move around in the bedroom, the bathroom, the soft click of a light going off.
Ten nights of the cabin settling and the river running and the knowledge that she was thirty feet away wearing my shirt with nothing under it.
I knew because the cabin got cold at night and it was thick enough on its own.
I'd seen the thin strap of her bra hanging over the bathroom door, which meant she wasn't wearing one, and that piece of information had been living rent-free in my head for the better part of a week.
I was standing in the kitchen getting water when she came out.
The hallway light was off. The main room was dark except for the last embers in the woodstove. She was a silhouette in the bedroom doorway, bare legs, my flannel hitting mid-thigh, her hair down around her shoulders. She'd been asleep. Her eyes were heavy with it.
"Couldn't sleep," she said.
"Me either."
She walked to the kitchen. Stood on the other side of the counter, where I'd lifted her two days ago, and I could see her thinking about it. Her gaze dropped to the surface and then came back to me.
"Cliff."
"Yeah."
"I'm tired of pretending that didn't happen."
"Me too."
She came around to my side. She crossed the four feet between us, put her hands on my chest, and looked up at me. Her eyes were dark and certain, and whatever had been holding her back was gone.
"Tell me to go back to bed," she said. "And I will."
I gripped her waist. The fabric was warm and underneath it her skin was warmer, and I could feel the tremble running through her.
"I'm not going to tell you that."
She kissed me.
It wasn't tentative. Her hands fisted in my shirt and she pulled me down and her mouth was open and warm and she tasted like toothpaste and underneath that, her.
My grip tightened on her waist and pulled her flush against me, every inch, and she made that sound again, the one from the counter, the breathy catch in her throat that went straight to my cock.
I walked her backward until her shoulders hit the wall.
Pinned her there with my hips and she gasped, her legs shifting apart, and I could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of my boxers.
My mouth found her throat, the soft skin below her ear, and she arched into me, her fingers digging into my shoulders.
"I've been thinking about this for ten days," I said against her neck. "Every time you walked through my kitchen in that shirt."
"Just the shirt?" Her voice was unsteady, breathless, and hearing Nell Chambers lose her composure was the best thing that had happened to me in ten days.
"The shirt. Your mouth. How you look at me when you think I'm not looking." I kissed the hollow of her throat and felt her pulse hammering against my lips. "The sound you made on that counter."
"Oh God." She pulled my mouth back to hers.
I slid my hands down to her thighs and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around me, the hem riding up, and I carried her two steps to the left and set her on the kitchen counter. The same spot. We both felt it, the callback, and she laughed against my mouth.
"This counter again."
"I've developed an attachment."
She laughed harder, genuine and surprised and warm, and a knot I hadn't noticed came loose.
I kissed her while she was still laughing.
She pulled at my shirt until I stripped it off over my head.
Her palms went flat on my pecs, her fingers tracing down my stomach, and she made a low hum of appreciation that landed somewhere behind my ribs.
"You're ridiculous," she murmured, her hands exploring. "This isn't fair. You look like this and you can cook."
"I also read thirty-one pages of your manual. I'm a renaissance man."
She was still laughing when I unbuttoned the flannel.
One button at a time, slow, watching her face.
The laughter faded into want as it opened.
Bare skin underneath. No bra, and I'd known that, and knowing it was nothing compared to seeing it.
Her breasts small and perfect, nipples peaked from the cold or from me.
I cupped one in my palm and ran my thumb across the tip.
She sucked in a breath and her head dropped back.
"Beautiful," I told her, and I meant it with my whole chest. "You're so fucking beautiful."
Her hips rocked forward. I could feel the heat of her pussy through my boxers, wet already, and knowing she was this turned on, this ready, made my cock throb.
I kissed down her throat, between her breasts, took one nipple into my mouth and sucked, and she gasped and her hands gripped the back of my head, holding me there.
"Cliff — oh —"
I switched to the other breast. Licked, sucked, grazed my teeth over the sensitive peak, and she was squirming beneath me, her hips grinding on me, her breath coming in sharp little pants that were undoing me.
I pulled back and looked at her. Flushed, lips swollen, half-undressed, her eyes half-lidded and glazed.
I'd never seen anything that hit me the way she did right then.
The fact that she was right here in my cabin wearing my shirt with her legs open for me was a reality I needed a minute to process at some point. Not now.
"I want to taste you," I said. "Can I?"
Her eyes widened. She nodded, and the eagerness in it, how she bit her lower lip, made me want to take my time and make her lose her mind.
I dropped to my knees.
I pulled her to the edge of the counter.
Hooked my fingers under the waistband of her underwear and slid them down her legs, simple cotton, nothing fancy, which was somehow hotter than anything she could have planned.
I spread her thighs wide. She was wet, glistening, and the sight of her open and wanting made my cock ache.
I kissed the inside of her thigh. Then the other. Took my time, lips tracing the sensitive skin, and she was already trembling, her fingers gripping the edge.
"Please," she whispered. "Cliff, please —"
I put my mouth on her pussy and she cried out.
I licked her slow. Long, deliberate strokes of my tongue from her entrance to her clit, learning her, figuring out what made her gasp and what made her hands fist in my hair and what made her thighs clamp against my ears.
She tasted like salt and want and warmth, and the sounds she was making.
God, the sounds. Little moans that built into desperation, her hips rocking against my mouth, her whole body winding tight.
"Right there," she breathed. "Don't stop, right there —"
I circled her clit with my tongue, steady, focused, and slid one finger inside her.
She was tight and wet and her muscles clenched around me and her breath broke into something between a sob and a moan.
I added a second finger, curled them, stroked the spot inside her that made her back arch off the counter.
"Fuck — Cliff — I'm —"
She came with her thighs shaking around my head and her hand fisted in my hair and a cry that started as my name and ended wordless.
I held her through it, my tongue gentle on her clit, my fingers still moving slowly inside her, drawing it out, and she rode the wave with her whole body, trembling and gasping and beautiful.
I stood up. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. She was boneless, eyes glazed, chest heaving, and she reached for me with fingers that weren't steady.
"Come here," she said, and her voice was so wrecked I was never going to forget it.
I kissed her and she tasted herself on my lips and moaned into it. Her hands found the waistband of my boxers and pushed them down, and then she slid off the counter and dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor, and my brain stopped working.
"Nell—"
She looked up at me. Flushed, hair falling across her face, eyes dark and deliberate, and she wrapped her fingers around the base of my cock and took me into her mouth.
I braced one hand on the counter. The other went to her hair, not pushing, just holding on, because her mouth was hot and wet and she was doing something with her tongue on the underside that made my vision go white at the edges.
She took me deeper, her cheeks hollowing, her hand working what her mouth couldn't reach, and the noise that came out of me wasn't one I recognized.
"Been hard since you walked out of the bedroom," I managed.
She pulled back just enough to speak, her lips still brushing the head. "That was four minutes ago."
"Longest four minutes of my life."
She laughed with her mouth on me. The vibration went straight through my spine, and I made a sound that was not dignified.
She took me deep again, her rhythm steady and confident.
I watched her, Nell Chambers on her knees on my kitchen floor, and the whole picture combined with how she felt was going to end me in about thirty seconds.
I slid my hand from her hair to her jaw. Tilted her face up. Gently, but firm.
"If you keep doing that, this is going to be over before it starts."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"It's a waste. I had plans."
"Plans." Her eyes darkened. She let me pull her to her feet. "What plans?"
I lifted her. She wrapped her legs around me and my cock pressed against her pussy, slick and hot, and we both groaned.
I carried her down the hall, my hands under her ass, her lips on my neck, her teeth grazing my collarbone.
I almost walked into the wall because her tongue found a spot below my ear that short-circuited my ability to find a hallway I'd walked ten thousand times.
"Left," she murmured against my skin.
"I know where my bedroom is."
"You were heading into the bathroom."
"I was taking the scenic route."